Vatican bows to pressure over archives

Lord Janner succeeded yesterday in persuading the Vatican to open some of its wartime archives. Marcus Tanner says the move will defuse a growing row over whether the Catholic church dirtied its hands with the Nazis' plundered loot.

Nazi gold campaigners battling to prize open the Vatican's secret wartime archives scored an unexpected victory yesterday, after papal officials offered to hand over 12 volumes to the scrutiny of the Holocaust Educational Trust.

The breakthrough followed the arrival in Rome of a delegation led by Lord Janner, the trust's chairman, and the former Tory minister Lord Hunt, chairman of the Inter-Parliamentary Council against Anti-Semitism.

After his successful meeting with Archbishop Tauran, Under-Secretary of State for the Holy See, Lord Janner said: "We have taken the first firm steps towards tracing the truth."

The former Labour MPadded: "He [the archbishop] undertook to provide 12 volumes of documents researched some 26 years ago and said when he had analysed them we should come back to them and they would look further."

Until now, the Vatican has steadfastly refused to grant outsiders access to its archives, which are bound by a 100-year secrecy rule. The church authorities insisted they had looked at the papers and there was nothing to confess. They said the archives also contained spiritual information which it would be quite inappropriate to release.

However, the church has been shaken in recent months by a furore over allegations that it helped in the disposal of treasures looted by the Nazis.

Speaking before his meeting Lord Janner told Radio 4's Today programme that it was quite unacceptable for a "great moral centre of the world" such as the Catholic Church not to open up its archives. People deserved to know "whether the allegations that the gypsies are making, that their plundered wealth is in the Vatican, are true or not", he said. "We are certain there were dealings between the Vatican, the Holy See at that time, with the Nazi authorities."

Lord Janner's coup is the first solid fruit in a campaign which has been growing since the end of last year. In November, just before the Nazi Gold conference opened in London, recently discovered documents were published in the United States which suggested the Vatican had kept tons of Holocaust gold on behalf the Nazi puppet regime in Croatia. Croat fascists, known as Ustashe, governed the country from 1941 until their defeat at the hands of Tito's Communists in 1945.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which spearheads the international hunt for Nazi war criminals, then called on the Holy See to open its archives and dispel rumours about the church's role in hiding gold looted by the Ustashe from their Jewish, Serb and Romany victims.

The centre claimed that this hoarded money was used to finance the so- called "rat runs", by which Croatian fascists were spirited out of Europe to Latin American states.

At the London conference the Vatican at first said it would not attend at all, though it later consented to send two observers. But calls for the Vatican to open its files clearly increased pressure on the church to override the secrecy rule.

At a time when the church is anxious to clear its conscience over its role in fomenting anti-Semitism, the Vatican clearly did not want to become embroiled in the same kind of controversy that has erupted over Switzerland's record in relation to gold confiscated from Jews by the Nazis.